The Formation of the German Chemical Community 1720-1795

By Karl Hufbauer

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520323377

Karl Hufbauer

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THE FORMATION OF THE

GERMAN CHEMICAL COMMUNITY

(1720-1795)

KARL HUFBAUER

Well before Germany emerged as a single nation or chemistry as a clearly defined profession, German chemists had formed a national scientific community that presaged the increasing specialization so characteristic of modern science.

This discipline-oriented community drew on the German interest in Enlightenment utilitarianism for its social support. It found a forum in the chemical journal established by Lorenz Crell in 1778. It proved its cohesiveness first by rejecting Lavoisier’s theory on nationalistic grounds and then, after a fierce struggle, by rallying behind the French system.

Karl Hufbauer’s pioneering prosopographical study of the early German chemical community (supplemented by appendices profiling the careers of individual chemists and the place of chemistry in German academic institutions) is rich in implications for the social history of science.

Karl Hufbauer is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.

The Formation of the German

Chemical Community

(1720-1795)

Karl Hufbauer

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1982 by

The Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America

123456789

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hufbauer, Karl.

The formation of the German chemical community.

Includes index.

1. Chemistry—Germany—History. I. Title.

QD18.G3H83 540’.943 81-2988

ISBN 0-520-04318-9 AACR2

ISBN 0-520-04415-0 (pbk.)

CONTENTS 1

CONTENTS 1

PREFACE

1 INTRODUCTION

2 MORAL SUPPORT

3 MATERIAL SUPPORT

4 MANPOWER SUPPORT

5 LORENZ CRELL: CHEMICAL JOURNALIST

6 THE FORMATION OF THE GERMAN CHEMICAL COMMUNITY

7 THE FRENCH CHEMISTRY

8 THE NOTORIOUS REDUCTION EXPERIMENT

9 CONCLUSION

Appendix I BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILES

Appendix II INSTITUTIONAL HISTORIES

Appendix III CRELL’S SUBSCRIBERS (1784-1791)

SUBJECT INDEX

PERSON AND PLACE INDEX

PREFACE

In 1964, when I began research on the social history of German chemistry in Hans Rosenberg’s seminar, I planned to use a brief chapter on eighteenthcentury developments as an introduction to a full study of the science’s professionalization in the nineteenth century. Over the next two years, however, I abandoned this plan. I was intrigued by indications that Germany’s chemists coalesced into a national discipline-oriented community during the 1780s and that their new social solidarity affected their reception of Lavoisier’s revolutionary theory during the 1790s. I was also impressed by the multiplicity and richness of materials bearing on the background and early history of the German chemical community. Accordingly, encouraged by Paul Forman, I decided to concentreate on chemistry in eighteenth-century Germany. My investigation resulted first in a dissertation, then in various articles, and finally in the monograph that follows.

I can acknowledge here but a few of the many people who have generously assisted me as my work has progressed. Roger Hahn, Hans Rosenberg, Charles Susskind, Paul Forman, Arnold Thackray, Bob Multhauf, Mary Ellen Bowden, Steve Turner, and Eric Robinson gave my dissertation thoughtful critiques upon its completion, inspiring me to take the project further. Everett Mendelsohn, Jon Jacobson, and Joe Slavin played key roles in assuring the continuation of my academic career, and hence my research. Tom Saine, Mike Johnson, Jon Wiener, Ed Todd, Larry Holmes, and anonymous readers made many substantive suggestions for improving the drafts preceding the present text. Gunter Mende taught me how to read Crell’s handwriting; David Heifetz aided me in assembling data regarding professorial careers; Ted Brunner, Richard Frank, Ray Oliver, and Craig Longuevan guided me through Latin and Italian passages; Cheryl Danieri assisted with the final editing of Appendices I and II; Henry Lowood, Paul Forman, and John Neu helped me locate and obtain the portraits; and Karin Fouts prepared the maps. Sally Hufbauer, Anne Rogers, Ellen Bork, and Jane Hedges have, in turn, served as my instructors in style. And the University of California Press has displayed virtuosity in transforming a complicated manuscript into the ensuing book.

Finally, I owe special thanks to those whose steadfast encouragement has enabled me to bring the project to completion—Paul Forman, Sally Hufbauer, Alan and Anne Rogers, Spece Olin, Jon Jacobson, Cathy Smith, Georg Harig, Mike Johnson, my children Sarah Beth, Ben, and Ruth Hufbauer, and my parents Clyde and Arabelle Hufbauer.

Irvine, California K. H.

January 1982

1 INTRODUCTION

Late in the eighteenth century, German chemists came to constitute a community. They began, that is, to regard one another as important peers, as primary arbiters of truth and merit. In Helmstedt in 1790, L. Crell expressed this new sense of community when he wrote across Germany to K. G. Hagen in Königsberg that a recent discovery made in Hameln by their countryman J. F. Westrumb provided a new buttress for our phlogiston which the French want to steal from us.1 The following year in Berlin, F. Wolff voiced this same collective consciousness when he called upon the most respected chemists of Germany to serve as terminological "legislators for their German chemical Mit bruder"2 Even before Germany was unified or chemistry was professionalized, German chemists had coalesced into one of the first national discipline-oriented communities.

The formation of the German chemical community, though hitherto unexamined by historians of science, warrants attention for three reasons. First, analyzing how support for chemistry rose to the level that German chemists could form into a scientific community contributes to a more complete understanding of the growth of science in eighteenth-century Germany. One cause of this growth, as contemporaries and historians have often remarked, was the ambition of a few German rulers to enhance their glory by imitating the French crown’s Académie.3 Another, as historians of German universities have recently shown, was the readiness of some German administrators and professors to promote university attendance, and revenues, by modernizing curricula and encouraging professorial publication.4 Yet another, as historians of German literature have established, was the eagerness of many writers and readers to reflect on the wonders of God’s creation.⁵ However, it was not only to emulate the French, attract students, and worship God that Germans supported science during the century of Enlightenment. As the growth of moral, material, and manpower support for chemistry reveals, Germans also did so because they came to believe that natural knowledge could be used to improve health and increase production.6

Second, analyzing the way in which German chemists drew upon social support for chemistry to form into a national community illuminates an important phase in the genesis of the social organization of modern science. Since the fifth century B.C., Western intellectuals have divided natural knowledge into various subjects, each encompassing distinctive phenomena, techniques, and goals. Among the newer fields, as O. Hannaway has recently shown, was chemistry, which A. Libavius, in reaction to Paracelsian universalism, defined and delimited around 1600.7 However, before the eighteenth century, the several branches of natural knowledge had more definitional integrity than social reality. While these disciplines, as they were sometimes called, were used in book cataloguing and university teaching, they did not correspond, except in a tenuous way, to enduring social networks. For the most part, men of science lacked both incentives for sustained attention to a single discipline and reliable means for identifying and communicating with others, who, at any given time, happened to share their interests. Consequently, they oriented themselves to the republic of letters which, from the 1660s onwards, found its most visible manifestations in royal societies and academies and in comprehensive reviewing journals.8 This state of affairs continued until the last third of the eighteenth century when, with the quickening of scientific activity and the appearance of specialized periodicals, the republic of letters began to break up along vernacular and disciplinary lines. Increasingly, men of science clustered into national discipline-oriented communities. In Germany such communities eventually had a significance extending far beyond their constituents. Between the 1790s and the 1840s they played an essential role in transforming the German universities into research centers, thereby making possible the professionalization of the sciences.9

Hence, the formation of the German chemical community illustrates how scientists in one field, despite residing in a fragmented nation and working at various occupations, achieved sufficient solidarity in the late eighteenth century to transform their science into a profession during the nineteenth century.

Third, examining the response of the newly formed German chemical community to Lavoisier’s antiphlogistic theory corroborates the importance of extrinsic factors in scientific revolutions. As early as the late eighteenth century, Lavoisier—evidently the first self-conscious revolutionary in science—noted that his allies tended to be physicists, mathematicians, and younger chemists and his foes, older and German chemists.10 Since Lavoisier’s day, scientists have often remarked that responses to competing theories have not depended solely on their empirical underpinnings, logical coherence, and heuristic value. An explanation for this seemingly aberrant behavior was offered by T. S. Kuhn in his provocative study of scientific revolutions. Because rival theories, he argued, are ultimately incomparable, or incommensurable, theoretical allegiances are open to extraneous influences.11 The late eighteenth-century debate between German phlogistonists and oxygenists both confirms and amplifies Kuhn’s interpretation of scientific revolutions. The protagonists’ stances and the revolution’s timing, it seems clear, were profoundly influenced by the structure and values of the emergent German chemical community.

Evidence bearing on the formation of the German chemical community has proved to be abundant. Much relevant material reposes in the manuscripts and publications of the German chemists and their contemporaries.12 More lies in scores of biographies13 and institutional histories.¹⁴ Still more is scattered through thematic studies dealing with the diffusion of a rational- utilitarian concept of chemistry in Germany,15 the growing activity of German pharmacists in chemical instruction and research,16 the establishment of German periodicals devoted to chemistry and related subjects,17 and the reception by German chemists of Lavoisier’s theory.18

Using evidence from these various sources, I propose a cultural-institutional explanation of the formation of the German chemical community and a conflict interpretation of its members’ full realization of their new social solidarity. In Chapters II, III, and IV, I maintain that educated and powerful Germans, as a consequence of their growing approval of the Enlightenment and enlightened governance, provided chemistry with increasing moral, material, and manpower support between 1720 and 1780. In Chapters V and VI, I go on to argue that Crell, by drawing upon chemistry’s Enlightenment audience for support, developed his new chemical journal (founded 1778) into a forum for German chemists and thereby fostered their coalescence into the German chemical community. And in Chapters VII and VIII, I analyze the antiphlogistic revolution in Germany, showing that the new community’s structure and values shaped this theoretical upheaval and suggesting that Ger man chemists came away from this conflict more fully aware of their collective responsibility and power as custodians of German chemistry.

The entire argument presupposes that the formation of the German chemical community was essentially a social process. So far as I can discern, German chemists did not form into a national discipline-oriented community as a result of embracing a common paradigm for investigating and interpreting chemical phenomena. The views that they came to share during the eighteenth century—confidence in chemistry’s usefulness and profundity, enthusiasm for chemical experimentation, pride in their identity as German chemists—were more akin to an ideology than a Kuhnian paradigm. However, this shared viewpoint, which derived from their shared experiences of trying to promote, advance, and harness chemistry within the context of German culture and institutions, did not in itself engender social solidarity. So long as they lacked a reliable means of communicating with one another, German chemists oriented themselves to local or cosmopolitan audiences. Only after Crell’s journal provided them with a forum did they begin thinking of the collectivity of German chemists as their most important reference group. Notwithstanding its social origins, the newly formed community soon proved capable of influencing the cognitive development of German chemistry by conditioning, perhaps in some instances dictating, its members’ responses to Lavoisier’s chemical system. The community’s formation intensified consensual pressures among German chemists, thereby introducing a significant new factor into the discipline’s development in Germany.

Three appendices follow the text. Appendix I presents sixty-five profiles of chemists who were active in Germany during the eighteenth century. Appendix II presents fifty-five institutional histories dealing with chemistry’s place in German schools and academies during the eighteenth century. And Appendix III presents a master list of the subscribers to Crell’s Chemische Annalen between 1784 and 1791. These appendices are intended to give readers an opportunity to check and, perhaps, to refine or refute my observations about the growth of social support for chemistry in eighteenth-century Germany. They are also intended to provide scholars who wish to look at related scientific, medical, and technological developments in Germany between roughly 1675 and 1825 with useful information and tools for their inquiries.

By way of setting the stage for all that follows, I shall now characterize cultural conditions in early eighteenth-century Germany and delineate the varied aims of self-styled chemists working within that milieu. Around 1700 Germany was a quarrelsome congeries of some three hundred principalities and imperial cities linked together not only by a common mother tongue but also by various feudal obligations, military alliances, and commercial dealings. The most pronounced cultural cleavage within this ramshackle nation was still between Catholics and Protestants. In the Catholic territories literacy was low, the lay intelligentsia was inconsequential, and the universities were moribund. In the Protestant lands, by contrast, conditions favored a comparatively spirited and open intellectual life. Thanks to the many schools founded during and since the Reformation to promote lay Bible reading, literacy was fairly high, especially in the towns. Thanks to opportunities for employment in towns and some state bureaucracies, the lay intelligentsia was sizable and, in cultural matters, increasingly influential. Thanks to the growing importance attached to religious and secular learning, the universities, especially those in Leipzig, Jena, and Halle, were moderately cosmopolitan and progressive. Extolling the fecundity of this culture, one Leipzig graduate, Hamburg school rector J. H. Hübner, exclaimed in 1712 that

during the last fifty or so years, there has been such a marked increase in the number of learned sciences that it would be necessary to double the number of university chairs for every discipline to be taught separately. Moreover, so much has been added to each science that the old natural philosophers, mathematicians, and historians, if they could rise again with all their knowledge, would only pass for poor beginners.

Furthermore, the population of the empire of learning has increased so greatly that now, wherever one turns, there are swarms of learned people and many lowly sciences which used to be left to mechanics are cultivated by literati. Finally, the present century is imbued with so much curiosity that everyone wants to know everything, or at least something about everything. Because these eager learners could not reach their goal so long as Latin had a monopoly in all learned matters, the Germans have followed the example of other nations and translated almost all the sciences into their mother tongue.19

To judge from his enthusiasm, Hübner’s Germany—i.e., Protestant, urban Germany—must have been, by the standards of the early eighteenth century, a relatively congenial setting for scholarly inquiry, scientific investigation, and learned charlantry.20

In fact, self-styled chemists were fairly numerous in Protestant Germany. The alchemists, at least the honest ones, were pursuing noble metals, wondrous panaceas, and transcendent knowledge. They worked in secrecy and, if they reported their endeavors at all, did so in cryptic writings so that unworthy adepts could not debase the art. Such precautions were evidently necessary, for one rhymester complained that

Everyone wants to be an alchemist;

Young men and old, the village idiots, The soldiers, priests, and merry politicians, Shorn monks, old wives, and broken-down physicians.21

Characteristic of the serious alchemist in early eighteenth-century Protestant Germany was the wandering pietistic physician, J. C. Dippel. We find him as a young man, delving into the secrets of metals at a country estate near Darmstadt around 1703 and evaluating Count Cajetano’s gold recipes for Prussia’s Frederick I in 1707. In later years, he was extolling his medicaments in 1728, selling a "particular arcanum chemicum" to Hesse-Darmstadt’s Ernst Ludwig in 1732, and prophesying seventy-five more years of life for himself shortly before dying in 1733.22

More prosaic than the alchemists, the iatrochemists of early eighteenthcentury Protestant Germany regarded chemistry as a handmaiden to medicine. Though some still propounded the bold chemical interpretations of health and sickness advanced in the preceding two centuries, these men were no longer pursuing physiological insights in their laboratories. Instead, they were content to seek novel drugs or cheaper methods of preparing existing remedies. J. H. Jüngken, town physician in Frankfurt am Main, was a representative figure. Certain that he, as a physician, knew best how to prepare potent chemical remedies, he engaged in a sideline drug business. He was so successful in selling his products that a Nuremburg barber charged him with infringing an imperial patent in 1702 and five Frankfurt apothecaries denounced him for dispensing medicines in 1726.23

Shunning the alchemists and iatrochemists, a growing number of chemists in early eighteenth-century Protestant Germany insisted that chemistry be approached as a rational science with wide-ranging applications. A few, inspired by the mechanical philosophy which prominent French and English chemists had espoused since the 1660s, believed that chemical phenomena could be explained in terms of atomic shapes and motions.²⁴ Most, however, rejected this reductionist program. Working within the framework established by Libavius, they regarded chemistry as an independent science with its own methods, concepts, and domain.25 Chief among the champions of the antireductionist viewpoint was G. E. Stahl, professor of medicine at Halle University from 1694 to 1714, then Royal Physician in Berlin until his death in 1734 (Figure I).26 In Berlin, he waged such a vigorous campaign for his version of the rational-utilitarian approach to chemistry that J. F. Henckel hailed him as a clear-sighted Columbus in 1722 and another disciple credited him with revealing chemistry’s true essentialness, effectiveness, attractiveness, and usefulness in 1734.27 Ultimately the approach to chemistry advocated by Stahl and his disciples became the rallying platform of the German chemical community. Stahlian rhetoric warrants, therefore, a full exposition.

According to Stahl, true chemistry was a rational, deliberate, and comprehensible investigation and processing of natural substances that led to fundamental knowledge. The true chemist, consequently, was inspired by a truly rational enthusiasm for research, a desire to find the true knowledge of the material composition of natural substances, and an eagerness to illuminate the truth of natural composition for its own sake. As he made his inquiries, he could expect intellectual pleasure, clear knowledge, and moderate advantages and benefits. He could, for example, use rational chemical processes to make appropriate changes in the strength of medicines. Or, more importantly, he could use chemistry to understand and improve mineral processing, distilling, brewing, and many other generally useful things.28

Fig. 1. G. E. Stahl, chief spokesman for the rational-utilitarian approach to chemistry in early eighteenth-century Germany.

Source: Georgii Ernesti Stahlii Opusculum chymico-physico-medicum

(Halle: Orphanotrophei, 1715)

Likewise Stahl’s disciple Henckel, physician and private chemistry teacher in Freiberg, maintained that chemistry held the key to nature’s secrets, for it

gemeinen verbrennlichen oder flüchtigen, als unverbrennlichen, oder fixen (Halle: Waysenhaus, 1718), pp. 1-19, 55, 195; his Ausführliche Betrachtung und zulänglicher Beweiss von den Saltzen, dass dieselbe aus einer Zarten Erde, mit Wasser innig verbunden, bestehen (Halle: Waysenhaus, 1723), pp. 2-3, 59, 332-335; and his Bedencken von der Gold-Macherey (1726), in J. J. Becher, Chymischer Glücks-Hafen, 3d ed. (Leipzig: Kraus, 1755), pp. i-xx.

penetrated to the core and essence of bodies. Although the chemist could not, for the time being, reasonably expect to construct a satisfactory system of natural knowledge, he could provide suitable building materials for posterity to construct such a system by patiently analyzing natural substances. In recompense for his efforts, the chemist could expect the joy of wresting clear concepts from experience, the pleasure of discovering unexpected truths, and the satisfaction of announcing his findings to the world. While the promotion of truth should be the chemist’s first aim, Henckel saw no need to renounce personal gain as a goal. After all, God regarded the care of one’s self and one’s own in any honorable occupation as a legitimate aim. If the chemist proceeded cautiously, he could expect results with actual advantages and usefulness in common life. Success was certain if, rather than seeking directly to make gold or some other specific product, the chemist were always alert to possible applications as he systematically investigated one substance after another.29

Similarly, Stahl’s protégé C. Neumann, Court Apothecary and professor of chemistry in Berlin, maintained that the goal of pure chemistry was to reveal the true innermost nature of the components of all bodies created by God. This goal could only be reached by the chemist who was willing to take charcoal into his hands, for chemistry was, praise God, a science of demonstration. Not only was the science and practice of chemistry the proper workshop for the true investigation of the natural creation, but it was also useful and indispensable for all the world’s professions—pharmaceutical or medical chemistry dealt with the preparation of medicines; do- cimastic chemistry, with assaying and smelting; mechanical chemistry, with arts and crafts such as glassmaking, dyeing, and painting; and economical chemistry, with industries using salts or fermentation processes.30

Believing that true chemistry deserved respect, patronage, and cultivation, the Stahlians expressed concern about the reputation that alchemists and iatrochemists had given the subject. Ever since Paracelsus had brought chemistry into general view, Stahl maintained, shameless claims had been made on its behalf. These claims had aroused almost completely false, de- lusionary hopes of making gold and equally futile aspirations of producing panaceas or powerful and infallible arcana for specific diseases. In pur-

suit of gold recipes and medical miracles, an unruly clique composed mostly of pharmacists and mining men had lost their wealth, time, honorable livelihoods, health, good reputations, and credit. The bungling, irrelevant snooping, and misfortunes of this host of uninformed gullible people had brought chemistry into such ill-repute that respectable people were rightfully reluctant to have anything to do with the science. Eager to change this state of affairs, to set themselves off from their rivals, and to win support for true chemistry, Stahl and his allies stigmatized the alchemists as gold-cooks and swindlers, the iatrochemists as medicasters and recipe-collectors, and the mechanists as mere cerebral chemists and unchemical corpuscle rummagers.

The Stahlians were particularly anxious to distinguish themselves from the alchemists. Admitting that mere word and name mongers still regarded Alchymie and Chymie as equivalent, Stahl insisted that the two words had come, although not so many years ago, to denote two completely different enterprises. Alchemy was the mostly confused and largely futile and vain undertaking … to make gold. Chemistry, by contrast, was devoted to rational experimentation as a means of expanding fundamental knowledge of natural substances. Alchemy had had its chance to accomplish something; now it was chemistry’s turn. This was all the more true because alchemy had four grievous faults. First, it was a civil nuisance because it had driven many to beggary and nourished swindling. Second, alchemy was morally objectionable because it encouraged hankering after gold, silver, and fantastic medicines and distracted its enthusiasts from their obligations to God. Third, there were neither reliable historical grounds nor sound rational- empirical arguments for believing in the present feasibility of alchemy. And fourth, there were no teachers capable of giving rational or even reliable instruction in alchemy. Consequently, it was foolish to incur the numerous certain inconveniences, dangers, and losses that resulted from the pursuit of alchemy’s so poorly grounded and attested hopes. Rather, one should apply his spare time and extra money to chemical investigations because such inquiries accorded with nature, reason, and true skill and dexterity. It might, Stahl conceded, someday prove possible to make gold, but the time was not yet ripe. One should learn the alphabet and how to spell before trying to comprehend not only unknown handwriting but also abbreviations, even tangled codes. In a similar spirit, Henckel maintained that the efforts of the gold-thirsty subjects of the alchemical empire, of the alchemical nitpickers, were doomed to failure. Though making gold was surely possible, the method for doing so would only be discovered after chemistry had made much more progress.

Thus the Stahlians wanted their countrymen to view chemistry as an independent and profound natural science which could be applied not only in pharmacy but also in metallurgy, brewing, dyeing, glassmaking, and many other crafts. They also wanted their countrymen to appreciate, finance, even participate in their endeavors to advance chemical knowledge. However, the Stahlians’ rhetoric on behalf of chemistry could only succeed insofar as their message, or at least parts of it, struck responsive chords in their audiences. Fortunately for them, they lived in more propitious times than their likeminded forerunners. As the Enlightenment unfolded, Germans, especially educated Germans in Protestant lands, became increasingly receptive and responsive to claims that chemistry could contribute to public health and material progress. By 1780, as we shall see in the next three chapters, chemistry enjoyed considerable moral, material, and manpower support in Germany.

1 A. Hagen, K. G. Hagen’s Leben und Wirken, Neue preussische Provinzial-Blätter, 9 (1850), 84. For biographical profiles of Crell, Hagen, and Westrumb, see Appendix I.

2 J. A. Chaptai, Anfangsgründe der Chemie, trans. F. Wolff, vol. I (Königsberg: Nicolo- vius, 1791), p. 4.

3 J. Ben-David has emphasized the role of French-style academies in supporting science in eighteenth-century Germany. See his The Scientist’s Role in Society: A Comparative Study (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.; Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 85, 111.

4 R. S. Turner, University Reformers and Professorial Scholarship in Germany 1760—1806, in The University in Society, ed. L. Stone, vol. II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 495-531; C. E. McClelland, The Aristocracy and University Reform in Eighteenth-Century Germany, in Schooling and Society: Studies in the History of Education, ed. L. Stone (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 146-173; and J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 137-140.

5 For orientation to these literary studies, see W. Schatzberg, Scientific Themes in the Popular Literature and Poetry of the German Enlightenment, 1720-1760, German Studies in America, 12 (1973); and T. P. Saine, Natural Science and the Ideology of Nature in the German Enlightenment, Lessing Yearbook, 8 (1976), 61-88. Also see O. Sonntag, The Motivations of the Scientist: The Self-Image of Albrecht von Haller, Isis, 65 (1974), 336-351.

6 The importance of eighteenth-century utilitarianism for the emergence of social support for chemistry in France and Britain has been emphasized by H. Guerlac, Some French Antecedents of the Chemical Revolution, Chymia, 5 (1959), 73—112; and A. Donovan, British Chemistry and the Concept of Science in the Eighteenth Century, Albion, 7 (1975), 131-144.

7 O. Hannaway, The Chemists and the Word: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).

8 R. Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666—1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

9 J. Ben-David’s provocative analysis of the nineteenth-century development of German universities into scientific centers neglects the role of preexisting discipline-oriented communities in this process. See his The Scientist’s Role in Society, pp. 108-138. R. S. Turner, by contrast, has correctly suggested that these communities began to influence the universities as early as the 1790s and were playing a prominent role in appointments and advancements by the mid-1830s. See his University Reformers... in The University and Society, II: 510-511, 522-525,531.

10 I. B. Cohen, The Eighteenth-Century Origins of the Concept of Scientific Revolution, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (1976), 257-288. Also see H. Guerlac, The Chemical Revolution: A Word from Monsieur Fourcroy, Ambix, 23 (1976), 1-4.

11 T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). H. G. McCann has recently sought to test Kuhn’s theory with a sociological study of the antiphlogistic revolution in France. See his Chemistry Transformed: The Paradigmatic Shift from Phlogiston to Oxygen (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1978). Though McCann makes an admirable attempt at quantification, his analysis is flawed—see my A Test of the Kuhnian Theory, Science, 204 (1979), 744-745.

12 For a fairly comprehensive yet rather slapdash guide to the publications of eighteenthcentury German chemists, see the Chemisch-Pharmazeutisches Bio- und Bibliographikon, ed. F. Ferchl (Mittenwald: Nemayer, 1937).

13 Among the numerous biographies referenced in the chemists’ profiles in Appendix I, I am particularly impressed by B. von Freyberg, Johann Gottlob Lehmann (1719-1767): Ein Arzt, Chemiker, Metallurg, Bergmann, Mineraloge und grundlegender Geologe, Erlanger Forschungen: Reihe B: Naturwissenschaften, 1 (1955); G. E. Dann, Martin Heinrich Klaproth (1743-1817): Ein deutscher Apotheker und Chemiker: Sein Weg und seine Leistung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1958); W. Herrmann, Bergrat Henckel: Ein Wegbereiter der Bergakademie, Freiberger Forschungshefte: Kultur und Technik, D37 (1962); I. Mieck, Sigismund Friedrich Hermbstaedt (1760 bis 1833): Chemiker und Technologe in Berlin, Technik-Geschichte, 32 (1965), 325-382; and W. Götz, Zu Leben und Werk von Johann Bartholomäus Trommsdorff (1770-1837), Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Pharmazie, 16 (1977).

14 Among the many studies bearing on chemistry’s place in the schools listed in Appendix II, the most valuable are H. Lehmann, Das Collegium medico-chirurgicum in Berlin als Lehrstätte der Botanik und der Pharmacie (Diss., Berlin University; Berlin: Triltsch & Huther, 1936); G.-A. Ganss, Geschichte der pharmazeutischen Chemie an der Universität Göttingen, dargestellt in ihrem Zusammenhang mit der allgemeinen und der medizinischen Chemie (Diss., Göttingen University; Marburg: Euker, 1937); G. Kallinich, Das Vermächtnis Georg Ludwig Claudius Rousseaus an die Pharmazie: Zweihundert Jahre Pharmazie an der Universität Ingolstadt-Landshut-München 1760-1960 (Munich: Govi, 1960); W. Oberhummer, Die Chemie an der Universität Wien in der Zeit von 1749 bis 1848 und die Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Chemie und Botanik, Studien zur Geschichte der Universität Wien, 3 (1965), 126-202; E. Mayr, Die Entwicklung der Chemie und der pharmazeutischen Chemie an der Universität Leipzig (Diss., Leipzig University, 1965); A. Hampel, Die beiden Lehrstühle für Chemie und für Pathologie an der Erfurter Medizinischen Fakultät während der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Diss., Erfurt Medizinische Akademie, 1968); and C. Meinel, Die Chemie an der Universität Marburg seit Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zu ihrer Entwicklung als Hochschulfach, Academia Marburgensis, 3 (1978).

15 W. Strube, Die Auswirkung der neuen Auffassung von der Chemie in Deutschland in derZeit von 1745 bis 1785 (Diss., Leipzig University, 1961); E. Schmauderer, Chemiatriker, Scheidekünstler und Chemisten der Barock- und der frühen Aufklärungszeit, in Der Chemiker im Wandel der Zeiten, ed. E. Schmauderer (Weinheim: Verlag Chemie, 1973), pp. 101-205; and H. Schimank, Der Chemiker im Zeitalter der Aufklärung und des Empire (1720-1820), in ibid., pp. 207-258.

16 G. E. Dann, Berlin als ein Zentrum chemischer und pharmazeutischer Forschung im 18. Jahrhundert, Pharmazeutische Zeitung, 112 (1967), 189-196; D. Pohl, Zur Geschichte der pharmazeutischen Privatinstitute in Deutschland von 1779 bis 1873 (Diss., Marburg University; Marburg: Mauersberger, 1972); B. H. Gustin, The Emergence of the German Chemical Profession 1790-1867 (Diss., University of Chicago, 1975); and E. Hickel, Der Apothekerberuf als Keimzelle naturwissenschaftlicher Berufe in Deutschland, Pharmazie in unserer Zeit, 6 (1977), 15-22.

17 H. Harff, Die Entwicklung der deutschen chemischen Fachzeitschrift: Ein Beitrag zur Wesensbestimmung der wissenschaftliche Fachzeitschrift (Berlin: Verlag Chemie, 1941); and D.von Engelhardt, Die chemischen Zeitschriften des Lorenz von Crell, in Indices naturwissenschaftlich-medizinischer Periodica bis 1850, ed. A. Geus, vol. II (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1974).

18 G. W. A. Kahlbaum and A. Hoffmann, Die Einführung der Lavoisier’schen Theorie im besonderen in Deutschland, Monographieen aus der Geschichte der Chemie, 1 (1897); and H. Vopel, Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem chemischen System Lavoisiers in Deutschland am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Diss., Leipzig University, 1972).

19 Hübner’s remarks appeared in the foreword to his popular medical-technological-scientific lexicon, the baroque title of which further reveals the interests of progressive Germans of the early eighteenth century. See his Curieuses und Reales Natur-Kunst-Berg-Gewerck- und Handlungs-Lexicon darinnen nicht nur die in der Philosophie, Physic, Medicin, Botanic, Chy- mie, Anatomie, Chirurgie und Apothecker-Kunst, wie auch in der Mathematic, Astronomie, Mechanic, Bürgerlichen und Kriegs-Baukunst, Schiffahrten, etc., Ferner bey den galanten und Ritterlichen Exercitien; bey Bergwercken, Jägerey, Fischerey, Gärtnerey; wie auch in der Kauffmannschafft, bey Buchhalten und in Wechsel-Sachen, bey Künstlern und Handwerckern gebräuchliche Termini technici oder Kunst-Wörter, nach Alphabetischer Ordnung ausführlich beschrieben werden, 3d ed. (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1717), pp. [iii-iv].

20 Of course, even in the most progressive towns relatively few of the inhabitants had a taste for reading. See, for instance, R. Engelsing, Analphabetentum und Lektüre: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Lesens in Deutschland zwischen feudaler und industrieller Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973).

21 For this doggerel, the essence of which was caught for me by Raymond Oliver, see Pantaleon [F. Gassmann], Examen alchymisticum … (1676), quoted in Deutsches Theatrum Chemicum, auf welchem der berühmtesten Philosophen und Alchymisten Schrifften … vor- gestellet werden, ed. F. Roth-Scholtz, 3 vols. (Nuremberg: Felssecker, 1728-1732), 11:290. My brief characterization of alchemy in early eighteenth-century Germany is, for want of adequate secondary studies, based on a wide variety of sources, including Roth-Scholtz’s collection of alchemical writings.

22 For a biographical profile of Dippel, see Appendix I.

23 For a biographical profile of Jüngken, see Appendix I.

24 The chief advocates of a mechanistic approach to chemistry in early eighteenth-century Germany were E. W. von Tschimhaus, G. W. Leibniz, and F. Hoffmann. In 1700 Tschimhaus, who had arranged for a German translation of N. Lemery’s text, recommended this work on account of its methodical approach. See his Gründliche Anleitung zu nützlichen Wissenschaften, facsimile of the 1729 ed. (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1967), p. 52. Leibniz and G. E. Stahl crossed pens over the value of mechanics in medicine and chemistry in 1708. For a general analysis of their exchange, see L. J. Rather and J. B. Frerichs, The Leibniz-Stahl Controversy, Clio Medica, 3 (1968), 21-40; 5 (1970), 56-67. The origins of Hoffmann’s corpuscu- larianism are illuminated in K. E. Rothschuh, Studien zu Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742), Zweiter Teil: Hoffmann, Descartes und Leibniz, Sudhoffs Archiv, 60 (1976), 235-270. Hoffmann’s unflagging loyalty to the mechanical philosophy was manifest in his recommendation of 1738 that medical students use the texts of Lemery and H. Boerhaave to learn chemistry. See his Medicus Politicus, in his Opuscula Pathologico-Practica (Venice: Balleon, 1739), p. 278. For a biographical profile of Hoffmann, see Appendix I.

25 The transmission and transformation of Libavius’s view of chemistry in the German universities during the seventeenth century is, I understand, being investigated by Hannaway. Recently A. G. Debus had made a case for the influence of the Paracelsian tradition on eighteenth-century chemists. See his The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, vol. II (New York: Science History, 1977). Stahl’s overt hostility to Paracelsianism (see below) suggests that, in his case at least, such influence was not very strong.

26 For a biographical profile of Stahl, see Appendix I. The best account of Stahl’s life and mature views on chemistry is I. Strube, Der Beitrag Georg Ernst Stahls (1659-1734) zur Entwicklung der Chemie (Diss., Leipzig University, 1960).

27 Henckel, Flora Saturnizans, die Verwandschafft des Pflanzen mit dem Mineral-Reich, nach der Natural-Historie und Chymie (Leipzig: Martini, 1722), p. 419; and the anonymous translator’s foreword to Stahl, Zymotechnia fundamentalis, oder Allgemeine grund-erkanntniss der Gährungs-Kunst (Frankfurt a. M.: Montag, 1734), p. [vii].

28 For these and subsequent quotations from Stahl, see his Zufällige Gedancken und nützliche Bedencken über den Streit, von dem so genannten Sulphure, und zwar sowol dem

29 For Henckel’s advocacy of the Stahlian program for chemistry, see his Flora Saturni- zans, pp. 13-15, 347, 463; his Pyritologia; oder: Kiess-Historie, als des vornehmsten Minerals, nach dessen Nahmen, Arten, Lagerstätten, Ursprung, Eisen, Kupfer, unmetallischer Erde, Schwefel, Arsenic, Silber, Gold, einfachen Teiligen, Vitriol, und Schmeltz-Nutzung (Leipzig: Martini, 1725), pp. 12-13, 25-31, 890-891; and the posthumous edition of his lectures, Unterricht von der Mineralogie oder Wissenschaft von Wassern, Erdsäften, Salzen, Erden, Steinen, und Erzen nebst angefügtem Unterrichte von der Chy mia Metallurgica, ed. J. E. Stephani, 2d ed. (Dresden: Gerlach, 1759), pp. 132, 135, 137. For a biographical profile of Henckel, see Appendix I.

30 For Neumann’s advocacy of the Stahlian program, see his Lectiones chymicœ von Sali- bus Alkalino-Fixis und von Camphora (Berlin: Schlechtiger, 1727), pp. 2, 35; his Lectiones Publicœ von vier subjectis Pharmaceuticis (Berlin: Haude, 1730), p. 3; his Disquisitio de Ambra grysea (Dresden: Hilscher, 1736), p. 5; and the posthumous edition of his lectures, Prœlectiones Chemicœ, ed. J. C. Zimmermann (Berlin: Rüdiger, 1740), pp. [i, iii]. For a biographical profile of Neumann, see Appendix I.

2 MORAL SUPPORT

Chemistry, J. F. Gmelin reminded the reader of his Geschichte der Chemie in 1797, used to be misunderstood, disdained, and ridiculed. In his day, however, the science had become the idol before which all peoples and all orders, princes, and subjects, clergy and laymen, the educated and uneducated, high and low, bend their knees.1 Though Gmelin exaggerated, the moral support or esteem for chemistry did increase during the eighteenth century. In the early 1700s, chemists in Germany enjoyed scant encouragement. They were, as the Stahlians complained, likely to be associated with sooty laborants, venal charlatans, rabid gold-bugs, and brazen swindlers. Between the 1720s and 1770s, however, these negative associations gave way to much more favorable ones, slowly at first and then with increasing rapidity. By 1780 many educated and powerful Germans esteemed chemistry as a basic natural science of broad utility. The present chapter seeks to illuminate this emergence of moral support for chemistry.2

Before the widespread establishment of effective institutional patronage for research during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the most important way in which social groups promoted scientific endeavors was by giving these endeavors their moral support. When educated men esteemed a science, they were likely to follow its developments, embrace its doctrines, acclaim its participants, and respect its patrons. And when powerful and wealthy men prized a science, they were apt to applaud its achievements, honor its leaders, reward its participants, and finance its instruction. Naturally such expressions of esteem by significant social groups reinforced the morale and dedication of the science’s participants, thereby promoting its cultivation and development.

The moral support that a social group accords a science and its devotees depends, I believe, on the relation between the group’s image of the science and the group’s values. A group that regards a science as irrelevant to or incompatible with its priorities will be indifferent or hostile to the science’s representatives. By contrast, a group that sees a science as connected with or contributing to its aspirations will bestow its moral support on those associated with the science.